I was away when Trevor Hanna, one of Northern Ireland's most famous journalists of the last half century, died aged 73 on 14 February.

A good obituary appeared on the Press Gazette website, pointing to his record as a reporter for the Belfast Telegraph (twice), the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and various freelancing activities.

It also mentioned several of his exclusives and certainly did him proud. But this weekend the Irish Timesfinally carried a tribute to Hanna and, despite coming six weeks after his death, started off with an unbeatable anecdote that summed up the man and, it should be said, the journalism of a bygone age.

It told how one evening in 1971, Hanna arrived in a Belfast dockside bar with a large wad of News of the World cash evidently "intended as a buy-up for some exclusive piece of tittle-tattle."

The first Bushmills had just reached his lips when the door burst open and a masked gang lurched in with pistols aloft. They ripped out the phone and cleaned out the till before turning on the customers, relieving them of wallets and other items of value.

The robbers retreated with the dire warning: "Anyone who leaves in the next 10 minutes will be shot."

The long, grim silence of the crime scene was broken by Hanna. He reached into his sock and produced Rupert Murdoch's wad, before uttering: "I suppose I'll have to buy the next round."

The Irish Times writer remarked, it was the kind of sang-froid that earned Hanna a reputation as the best in the business.